For Fun, Los Alamos Team Goes Digging For Dinosaurs

A `good-neighbor' policy at the nuclear weapons lab inspires researchers to aid paleontological digs in the New Mexico hills It stands to reason that the pursuit of dinosaur bones is not part of Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory's official research portfolio. After all, this is the home of the first atom bomb, its resident researchers are primarily involved in the physical sciences, and nuclear weapons development is still pretty much the name of the game. So why have electron microscopist Roland Hagan, physical chemist George Matlack, organic chemist Dale Spall, and dozens of other Los Alamos scientists spent countless hours during the past five years investigating what appears to be the largest creature ever to roam the earth--a 140-foot-long, 80-ton reptile named Seismosaurus that lived 150 million years ago? Part of the answer is to satisfy their curiosity about what's buried in a mesa 70 miles away in north central New Mexico. But they couldn't have indulged their paleontological pursuits if it weren't for a "good neighbor" policy at the lab that permits them to share their knowledge and access to powerful equipment with the public. "We work on weekends and in the evenings, using some very sophisticated and expensive equipment," explains Spall. "It's fine with them [top lab officials] as long as I don't need to spend any money." Adds Hagan, "We aren't getting paid to do it, and we do it on our own time. We're just having fun." Sharing The Wealth The opportunity for Spall and his colleagues to explore paleontology arose from the lab's decision to share with the Los Alamos community some of the assets of the federally funded laboratory, including the skills of its 7,000 employees, the resources from its $1 billion annual budget, and the technical power of its prodigious array of sophisticated equipment. Combined with the insatiable curiosity common to most scientists, the program has resulted in and continues to produce valuable discoveries within paleontology, archaeology, and other disciplines that thrive in the geological and cultural environment of the Southwest. "It's a classic example of why a national lab exists," says Hagan, who's worked at Los Alamos since 1957, about the Seismosaurus project. "There's no commercial value in excavating dinosaur bones, so no private company is going to fund the work. And a university isn't likely to have all the different equipment that you'd need to do the job right. "But here at Los Alamos, we cut across all disciplinary boundaries. And we have resources that aren't available anywhere in the world." Although other national labs give their scientists the freedom to pursue outside interests, few, if any, allow them to use their lab bench for other than its intended purpose. "It happens every once in a while," says public information specialist Ken Frazier of Sandia National Laboratories in nearby Albuquerque, "but it's awfully low-key. Most of them don't even tell us about it." A spokesman for Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory says that he's not aware of any such policy at Oak Ridge, and adds that he'd "wonder about the propriety of using government property for such purposes." Propriety notwithstanding, the program has shown results. In April, for example, Spall described his discovery of protein fractions in the fossilized remains of Seismosaurus to a regional meeting of geologists. His findings, which already have been published in the Journal of Protein Chemistry (10[1]: 75-90, 1991), and will be part of a book coming out next year, push back by some 70 million years the date of the earliest known proteins. They also provide paleontologists with important clues on the evolution of skeletal molecules and the fossilization process itself. Spall, who's been at Los Alamos for 16 years, acknowledges that it may seem a bit unusual for an organic analytic chemist at a nuclear weapons laboratory to be working on prehistoric creatures. But he has an explanation. "Almost everybody around here is an amateur archaeologist," says Spall. "With so much history in the ground, it's hard to ignore it. I admit that I'm hooked--it's a lot of fun. And it's a chance to investigate something that's outside our chosen fields, something we otherwise don't get a chance to see." And the fields of interest of these scientist-volunteers are unlimited, he says. "If an outside organization has a problem that interests people here, then the lab is willing to spend time on it, gratis," says the 45-year-old Spall, whose work in preservation chemistry on behalf of Seismosaurus is only the most recent in a series of projects over the past 15 years to which he has lent his expertise. He's helped a local artist find the right material to restore Renaissance Italian fresco paintings, and helped law enforcement officials in their investigation of a spate of mysterious cattle mutilations. Common Ground The idea of making the lab's resources accessible to the community goes back to the mid-1970s, says Matlack, who came to Los Alamos in 1949, retired officially a few years ago, and now, at age 70, serves as senior adviser to the analytic chemistry group in the lab's division of chemistry and laser science. It began with the realization that there was common ground between lab scientists and local archaeologists. "People from the National Park Service, from local and state museums, and from the community came to us asking what Los Alamos could do to help characterize some of the archaeological artifacts in the surrounding hills," Matlack says. "And a group of lab scientists offered to help with such analyses as determining the age of the artifacts, their chemical composition, and their physical characteristics." Out of this interaction, says Matlack, grew the Paleontology and Archaeology Research Team (PART), an informal group of scientists who met occasionally to hear from outside scientists working in those fields. Hagan's first foray into the volunteer program stemmed from his desire to find additional uses for a then-new piece of equipment. "I was working for a physicist," Hagan recalls, "and we had just acquired a solid state detector for X-ray fluorescence analysis. We wanted to test its capabilities, so we applied it to analyzing the fragments of Indian pottery in the area. We even wrote a few papers on it." Such analyses are now done routinely, he says, and yield a chemical "fingerprint" of the material that can be used to pinpoint its origins. But pure science isn't the only reason Hagan volunteers his time and expertise, he reveals: "When I was a kid I read about the dinosaur expeditions to the Gobi Desert [in the 1920s], and it captured my imagination. So I've gotten quite a kick out of working on a real dinosaur dig." In 1986 the PART team invited Dave Gillette, then curator of paleontology at the relatively new New Mexico Museum of Natural History in Albuquerque, to give a talk on his recent excavation of some dinosaur bones. Tipped off by some hikers to a discovery made about six years earlier, Gillette had recently begun to analyze eight tail vertebrae belonging to what he would later label Seismosaurus (earth-tremor lizard). Gillette, now Utah's state paleontologist and chief scientist for the Southwest Paleontology Foundation, the nonprofit organization that is conducting the dig, at first said no to the request from Los Alamos. "I had no interest in talking to those people," he remembers. "After all, I study big bones and describe them, and they work on bombs." But Gillette soon changed his mind: "I'd only lived in New Mexico for two years, and I'd never been to Los Alamos, so I figured, `What the heck. I'll present a few problems that I'm up against, and see if they can help.' " Gillette challenged his audience to find a way for him to see into the ground, so that he could know where to dig to find more bones. He also wanted to test the existing theory of how fossils are formed, in particular, the idea that the bone is replaced by inorganic matter, molecule by molecule, over millions of years. Both problems struck a chord with his audience. "I was overwhelmed by the response," he recalls. "There were probably 70 or 80 scientists in the room, and half of them must have lined up afterwards to talk with me. It's a great example of collaboration among disciplines." What Spall and the others who investigated the chemistry of bone preservation found, among other things, was that the molecule-replacement theory was stone-cold wrong. "It turns out the bone is original," says Gillette, "despite being buried under 2,000 foot of soil and extremely high pressures. A detailed analysis of the bone shows that fact very clearly." The use of remote sensing devices at the dig, including an effort led by mechanical engineer Alan Witten of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has so far failed to spot any bones, says Gillette. But it promises to make a valuable contribution to techniques being developed to locate buried hazardous wastes. New Studies Of Old Bones Beyond their role in uncovering Seismosaurus, the lab scientists are pushing the field of paleontology into the 21st century. "These guys [at the national labs] are using equipment I don't even understand," says Gillette. "Without their help, I would have simply dug up the bones and described them as best I could," using techniques developed more than a century ago, when the science of paleontology was young. Nearly 100 strong, the Los Alamos team involved in the Seismosaurus project features cerebral theoretical physicists and down-to-earth lab technicians working side by side. "I welcome anybody with an idea," says Gillette, who so far has raised about $150,000 for the dig and estimates that he'll need twice that over the next several years to complete the excavation and do the painstaking laboratory work needed to prepare all the bones that have been unearthed. "It's the old think-tank approach: There are no rules, and nobody's ideas are too dumb to try. People work at their own speed, and it thrives because of their curiosity, their inspiration, and their willingness to ask questions." The Seismosaurus dig isn't the only game in town. There are dozens of other scientists involved in projects relating to the cultural heritage of the region, and they hold brown-bag lunches once a month to update each other on their progress. Hagan admits that he and others are beginning "to burn out a little" on Seismosaurus. "We run on enthusiasm, but it's hard work, too," he says. Yet when he mentions the possibility that a new site will open up, the excitement returns to his voice. "When we started this, I had no idea it would become this big," says Hagan, who teamed up with Gillette initially to analyze bones from a Tyrannosaurus rex and then switched to the newest behemoth. "The joke around here is that Seismosaurus has become the largest project at Los Alamos."

For Fun, Los Alamos Team Goes Digging For Dinosaurs

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